If large language models can reason — as they are now widely said to do — then the source of that reason must be words. This talk discusses the epistemic order that LLMs are currently unfurling throughout our culture, from policy to science to writing. LLMs tap into a vein of rationality in which poetics and rhetoric, rather than deduction and induction, play the leading role. They present a new status quo in what can be called the "accidental mythology" of the modern world. In this new myth of reason, metaphor too easily slides into metaphysics, unchecked by the model.
Leif Weatherby is Associate Professor of German at New York University, where he also directs Digital Humanities and is founding director of the Digital Theory Lab. His scholarship focuses on literary theory, digital culture, and the history of science, with particular attention to the philosophical foundations of computing and AI.
He is the author of Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx (Fordham, 2016) and, most recently, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), which argues that large language models don't simulate cognition but instead generate culture, and calls for new theoretical frameworks to evaluate them. He also co-edited the first English edition of Ernst Kapp's 1877 Elements of a Philosophy of Technology. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Grey Room, The Hedgehog Review, and Cabinet.
Co-organized by the Center for Digital Humanities, Media + Modernity, and the Princeton Humanities Initiative.